Jamie-Lynn Sigler didn’t think she “would survive” her “toxic” marriage to former manager Abraxas “AJ” Discala.
The actress told Us Weekly on Wednesday that she fantasized about death during her “complicated” and “really messy” romance with her first husband.
When the former couple got together, Discala, 55, “was in a relationship and tied to his family and then [Sigler] got diagnosed with MS,” the “Sopranos” alum recalled.
Because of “all of these things,” Sigler felt like the “relationship had to work” to make the struggles “worth it.”
The “Entourage” alum was hiding her multiple sclerosis from the public at the time, as well as her marriage issues and past eating disorder — and all of the secrets “piled up on top” and “suffocated” her.
“I was just … literally trying to survive every day,” Sigler told the outlet. “I was constantly in survival mode. … I knew that I didn’t want to be with him, but I was terrified to be without him. Who would protect me?”
The “MeSsy” podcast host was “so dependent” on Discala that she felt she would be “free-falling” without him.
“It was very complicated and very scary, and I think that’s what led to that incredibly painful and dark moment for me of just feeling, like, ‘I can’t feel this much pain anymore,’” she said. “I had to get to the moment where [I understood] that I was not going to survive much longer if I stayed in that marriage.”
She added that her thoughts about dying weren’t “even really about suicide” but, instead, “a cry for help.”
Sigler said, “I needed someone to know how much pain I was in. I needed somebody to know how terrified I was, how overwhelmed I was, and he was going through his own thing, and he couldn’t see it. I couldn’t share it with anybody else. It was just a desperate cry for help, and I was terrified.”
Although she felt like a “failure” becoming a divorced 24-year-old, Sigler and Discala ultimately called it quits.
Discala has since been convicted in a $300 million pump-and-dump stock scheme and sentenced to more than a decade in prison.
Sigler, who describes their breakup in her “And So It Is” memoir, moved on with restaurateur Scott Sartiano, followed by actor Jerry Ferrara and NFL player Mark Sanchez.
In 2012, she began dating her now-husband, Cutter Dykstra.
The couple got married in January 2016 and have two sons — Beau, 12, and Jack, 8.
The family of four reside in Austin, Texas, where Sigler moved in 2021 in order to navigate her MS battle with more privacy.
